When I Meet You (Tree of Life #3) - Olivia Newport Page 0,1
thrived on it. Not Jillian. She inherited some sort of recessive introvert gene—and another one for preferring a well-ordered life.
“The curator called me,” Nolan said.
“And how do you know a museum curator?”
He shrugged. “We had coffee once.”
That meant Nolan had chatted with the curator in the line ordering coffee or something else equally ordinary and forgettable to most people.
“And?” Jillian said.
“And he has a situation he thinks may require legal attention. Or at least he’d like to probe a legal opinion about the advisability of legal representation around matters of liability and financial consequence.”
“Now that’s legal speak if ever I’ve heard it.”
“Do not mock my profession, young lady.”
“Never!” Jillian laughed. “What does this have to do with me? Or a souvenir? Is this all just an excuse to get me out of the house?”
“What if it is? It’s a fine day for a drive, and I enjoy your company.”
“You don’t have to charm me. I already love you.”
“Oh, right.”
“It’s Saturday. And you’ll be in Denver on Monday. Why the special trip?”
“Because I wanted to bring you along, obviously.”
“Dad.”
Nolan checked his mirrors and changed lanes again. Clearly they were headed to Denver now.
“Here’s what I know,” he said. “It’s not much. Years ago—decades, I think—the museum received a trunk that was abandoned at Union Station.”
“Decades?”
He nodded. “The curator is relatively recent, but the museum is about fifty years old. He’s not at all sure of the story, but from what he can tell, the trunk arrived at Union Station over a hundred years ago and somehow was separated from its owner.”
“Surely the railroad would have had a procedure for unclaimed luggage.”
“We don’t know what happened, Jilly.”
“How did the museum get the trunk?”
“I don’t know that either. He didn’t say. I’m not sure he knows. It’s not a large museum. It’s one of those places where a historic home in a notable neighborhood has been converted to a museum and gradually they collect pieces that might have been authentic to the period. My guess is that they ended up with the trunk that way.”
“Union Station wouldn’t just give away lost luggage.”
“Not at the time, no. Perhaps never, officially. But at some point, someone took possession of it. Maybe someone just thought it was in the way of a renovation project. Rich—the curator—discovered it just a few days ago while he was overseeing an effort to clean out and organize overcrowded storage space in the house’s basement. There’s no record of the item being logged into the collection of the museum, yet there it is.”
“Very irregular.”
“Yep.”
“Somebody must have had it in between. Whoever’s hands it ended up in after Union Station got tired of it and dumped it on the museum because the thrift store didn’t want it. It’s probably been painted and full of junk while somebody used it as a coffee table after finding it at a flea market.”
“Nope. It’s the real deal. Rich brought in a locksmith to pick the locks as carefully as possible to preserve the integrity of the trunk,” Nolan said.
Jillian’s jaw dropped. “You mean it hadn’t been opened before this? In a hundred years?”
“As I understand it, that seems to be the case.”
“They didn’t find a body, did they?”
Nolan chortled. “I’m pretty sure Rich would have recognized that as a legal matter without requiring my opinion.”
“Then?”
“The usual personal items,” Nolan said, “along with a considerable stack of business records from a company in Ohio. Financial records.”
“Enter the legal questions.”
“Maybe or maybe not.”
“It is a curious question why someone travels from Ohio to Colorado with a trunk full of business financial records and then abandons them.”
Nolan wiggled one eyebrow. “See? Isn’t this better than cleaning your office?”
“Just tidying.” Jillian turned her palms up. “But my piles can wait.”
“As a historian, Rich is intrigued. But he’s concerned both for the matter of the museum having custody of these records and whether there might be legal liability without due provenance of the alleged donation if there should prove to be any value connected to it because of the records. He’s also worried about the issue of the financial documents and what they might mean for who could have benefited by how the matters they represent were—or were not—resolved.”
“But you said it was over a hundred years ago,” Jillian said. “Can you really figure that out now?”
Nolan nodded. “These are all questions I’d have to look into. My instinct is that Rich merely wants to dot every i and cross every t but that there won’t be any legality to